250 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY. 



The President said it remained for him to propose a vote of thanks 

 to Professor J. Arthur Thomson, who had come all the way from 

 Aberdeen to give the Society this address, and he was happy to endorse 

 from the chair every word of appreciation uttered by Sir Ray Lankester. 



The vote was carried by acclamation. 



Sir Ray Lankester, K.C.B., M.A., D.Sc, F.R.S., prefaced his 

 paper on " The Supposed Exhibition of Purpose and Intelligence by 

 the Foraminifera " by expressing his pleasure in welcoming ^fr. Heion- 

 Allen as President of the Society, and assuring his audience that his 

 criticism of some of the views put forward by the President implied no 

 want of regard or affection for liis friend. 



This paper and the President's reply will appear in full in the 

 Journal. 



Professor Flinders Petrie ventured a word or two with regard to 

 the desperate poverty of language which was one of the main points 

 that the paper made. There were plenty of cases — he lielieved well 

 authenticated — in which men had got up in their sleep and written out 

 statements of which they were totally unconscious, but which had 

 solved questions on which they had been deliberating for some time 

 without being able to reach a solution. He assumed that there was 

 purpose and intention in that writing, but it was absolutely unconscious 

 purpose and intention. 



Professor Benjamin Moore said that looking at evolution as a 

 whole, one found continuity all through it. l^Iost people, unless they 

 were heretical as he was, believed there was a breach between the 

 inorganic world and the organic. The physicist and chemist were now 

 beginning to recognize some continuity between the electron and the 

 inorganic colloid. There was a point in evolution at which only two 

 or three molecules were united together in which it passed the wit of 

 man to say whether one was dealing with a crystalloid or a colloid. 

 So if one desired to get away from pure matters of terminology, 

 one must bear in mind that continuity. One found wonderful cleverness 

 in the insect, such as in the one which knew exactly where to stick its 

 sting into the caterpillar a determined number of times so as to 

 paralyze but not to kill its victim ; and that looked much like pur- 

 posive intelligence. There might be a very complex mechanism for 

 carrying out a small purpose, which was very clever within the limits 

 of that purpose, and yet was not comparable to the work of the human 

 brain. Much of the talk as to the difference between instinct and 

 intelligence existed because of loss of perspective. Deeper thinking led 

 one to ask, " Is there anything purposive ? " We believed we had 

 purposes, but those things were laid down in us, either by heredity or 

 by previous training. AVhile there seemed in the human case to be a 

 choice, it was not clear that there was, any more than in the case 

 of the Foraminifera. The choice, so far as it existed at all, seemed 

 to him — though it might seem a peculiar opinion for a scientist to 

 hold — to lie in something outside, playing in upon us and guiding 



